Here in Zero Towers we’ve long wished to compost our kitchen and garden waste, but without garden waste we’ve had to settle for long wishing to compost our kitchen waste, and without a garden we’ve had to settle for not composting our kitchen waste because we’ve not had a garden to store a composter in. But we are wishing no longer. Now we are doing. And we still don’t have a garden.

Composting is one of those things that people used to do in The Before Time but forgot about a generation or so ago. WRAP reckons we throw away most of the 11.8 million tonnes of food waste we produce every year. That’s silly. Instead, those of you blessed with gardens or allotments can get composters. You can throw all of your raw biodegradable waste into them, wait a few months while nature and physics get busy, and then enjoy the compost that pours forth.

The good news is they’re not expensive. Many local authorities offer discounted compost bins. In Zero City we can buy a 220 litre bin made from recycled material for £8, discounted from £39. And they’re not big. To give you an idea of size, the 220 litre bin is about the height of 12 bricks from the Great Pyramid of Giza, the width of ten thousand compressed ant eyelashes, and weighs about as much as if the concept of liberty assumed the form of a Cuban tree frog. Or 72 x 72 x 88 cm. You get the idea. But none of this is helpful if you don’t have a garden.

We’ve got a wormery! They work in the same way as composters but you can keep them indoors as they’re supposed to be odour-free even though they have a higher concentration of worm poop. How it works: you throw your kitchen waste into it, let the worms munch on it as it rots, wait for them to poop it out, and then use their poop as compost. Wormeries are typically smaller than composters, roughly as tall as a short leprechaun, as wide as Pinocchio’s nose is long after lying by omission but feeling bad about it, and as heavy as a small plastic bin full of food and worm shit. Ours sits happily in our fairly small hallway. We’re finally composting!

The DEC appeal to raise funds for victims of the Haiti earthquake has been open for 10 days and just passed the £42 million mark. Before I blogged about it last week it stood at just £12 million. Coincidence?

Yesterday I did a couple hours of bucket holding in a train station somewhere in the UK. I can’t disclose the precise location because it could help those trying to discover my true identity, and it’s vital my identity remains a secret. It’s vital or my name’s not J- oops! Almost let the cat out of the bag there! I’ll have to be more careful. It’s tough, though, not dropping hints. Already you know I’ve got a cat and a bag.

But I digress. Yesterday I did a couple hours of bucket holding. It was the best of people, it was the worst of people. Lots of people gave lots of money, more than any collection I’ve volunteered for before. Instead of coppers I got pound coins, instead of pound coins I got notes, and instead of polite smiles I got “Isn’t it awful” conversation. It seems this is one of those times when people realise that humans are humans everywhere, not really separated by borders or ideologies but together in the universe, forever bound by our wish to live happily with dignity and freedom and love around us, that what happens to a Haitian happens to us all, that we should offer help to them as if to a neighbour. But there were also plenty of arseholes knocking about.

Thousands of people walked past and gave nothing, outnumbering the givers by about 20 to one. Now, I don’t want to judge. It’s entirely possible they’d already given to one of the other bucket holders in the station, or already donated online, or already loaded a cargo plane with survival kits, or already flown to Haiti to pull victims from the rubble, but it’s more likely they’re just a bit tight.

Make no mistake, stinginess is the issue here. There are not enough poor people in the country that thousands could congregate in a train station to walk past me on a Friday afternoon. You’d have to be broke to the point of homelessness not to throw 10p in a bucket. One woman, loaded down with bags from Gap, stopped to ask me if there was a Starbucks in the station and walked out when I said there was only a Costa. And she gave me not a coin. Not a bean. Not a sausage. To be fair, no one else gave me beans or sausages but they did at least give me cash. She gave me nothing. And while £42 million sounds good, when you think there are 60 million of us in the country it starts to look like the majority aren’t giving, or aren’t giving much.

In summary, lessons learned from the collection:
(i) when we get together in the spirit of humanity and brotherhood we can be generous according to our means, the rich can support the poor, the strong can support the vulnerable, and good things can happen in far away places;
(ii) humans are a bit shit.

On 12 January, Haiti suffered a major earthquake that now has an estimated death toll of between 50,000 and 100,000, and left an estimated 3 million people without access to food, water and shelter. It’s horror and hardship on a scale that should be unimaginable but is sadly familiar. Governments from the rich side of the world have pledged to provide aid but what are Zeroes to do?

We can give money. The DEC Appeal that launched on the 13th and was broadcast yesterday has already raised £12 million through phone and online donations. This is what happens when we do stuff. I added 50 of my smackers to the appeal yesterday, gift aiding it to give an extra £12.50 at no cost to me. According to the appeal page, that could buy a food pack that would last a family for two weeks or a couple of kits of household essentials. That’s money well spent.

If we use social networking sites we can promote the appeal to others. According to a BBC News article, millions have already been raised through Twitter, Facebook, SyllableMessage and Ant. We can Tweet the appeal number (0370 60 60 9000), link to the DEC in our status updates (www.dec.org.uk) and embed the DEC video appeal on our pages via You Tube.

I’m in the market for a new mobile phone. My current one has taken on some charming qualities of late such as refusing to turn on when off, refusing to turn off when on, freezing its keypad, neglecting to send or receive texts and generally proving itself to be about as useful as a chocolate crack pipe. I feel fully justified in seeking a replacement.

Pre-Zero epiphany I’d have nipped out to the shops to buy a new phone. It’d be a bottom of the range brick because I’ve never cared about having anything shiny or state of the art but it would have been new. Nipping out would have been easy, convenient, uncomplicated. That’s just not the Zero way.

Instead I’ve gone for a second hand reconditioned phone from 2ndhandmobilephones.co.uk, although there are tons of other suppliers out there. There are millions of these things knocking about so it seems wasteful to buy a new one, demanding new metal and plastic be produced and energy wasted in its production. The International Telecommunication Union reckons we passed our four billionth mobile phone subscription in 2008. According to an industry report quoted in the press, 2007 saw more than one billion new handsets sold. Safe bet these were not all first time purchases but included replacements for perfectly functioning but less down-with-the-kids phones.

And my old phone’s not about to sit idly in a landfill. Instead it’ll be bunged in an envelope and sent to a charity that sells them in bulk to recyclers. Recycling Appeal says it’s made £3.2 million for its partner charities since 1999. So good’s done all round.

That’s The Zero way, netshelled. Taking an every day thing, thinking how it impacts on the world and figuring how to do it a better way. About now I’d be tempted to go for a big finish like, “You can do it too! Go to it, Zeroes! Out into the world and do!” But as no one’s reading this I may as well slink off to a small, darkened room, crouch in the corner and whisper it to a passing ant.

I’ve been writing The People’s Zero for about four years now, at times with a manic fervour, at others in a distinctly half-assed fashion. Since work began I’ve boycotted Nestlé, expanded the range of Fairtrade food in Zero Towers, recycled everything I can get my hands on and generally Butterflied my heart out. But the point of the site, originally, was to follow what I was up to; following the changes a nobody can make in his life and the difference they make when added to the changes of other nobodies. That’s all being lost while I work on the articles that were originally just going to be background reading for the blog.

As time passes I find myself overtaken by events. Dairy Milk, the UK’s largest selling chocolate bar, has become Fairtrade certified. Kit Kat, produced by the usually evil Nestlé, has just announced it’ll use Fairtrade chocolate in the UK from January 2010. It’s hard to take credit for these things when the blog’s inactive and the Fairtrade section’s not online. And as for the US electing its first black President, the whole thing was my idea – but try proving it. In summary: expanding the site has been good for the site but bad for the blog.

So here begins the great Zero blog, tracking the efforts of a particularly nobodyish nobody. I make no claims to be a great man. I am merely a man like any other. A simple man. Some would say a stupid man. But a man who will turn tears to laughter, hate to love, war to peace and everyone to everyone’s neighbour. A man who quotes Johnny Mathis lyrics to look hip to the youth.

And years from now, when my statue graces Trafalgar Square and blue plaques mark my every step we will look back at this first blog entry and say, “Never heard of him.”